A load off my mind

Watched W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Playing Egbert Souse — pronounced with a gleeful French twist as “Sue-zay” — Fields wanders into the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, his favorite bar.

“Um, was I in here last night and spend a twenty dollar bill?” asks Souse.

“Yeah,” says the bartender.

“Oh, boy,” he says, then grins like a baby given its bottle. “What a load that is off my mind.”

After falling out of bed laughing, all I could think was… unfunded US social security liability. Twenty years from now, a befuddled US retiree will stumble into a bar and mutter to the bartender — “Did I spend $2 trillion in here a couple of decades ago?”